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Home , Adolf Loos, Hans Tietze, Oskar Kokoschka

and Masaryk*

JOSEF P. HODIN

Oskar Kokoschka, born in Pochlarn, , on March 1, 1886, is a truly cosmopolitan artist. His father was of Czech origin, his mother Austrian. He is claimed today by the , the Austrians, the Ger- mans, and the English as their leading painter. He never exchanged his Austrian passport for a German one, although it was suggested to him on various occasions. He had a Czechoslovak passport during the years when he stayed in as an emigré, 1934-1938. He spent the years from 1938 to 1953 in England. He lives now in Switzerland, with an English passport, is married to a Czech lady, and today shares with Picasso and Chagall a world-wide fame in the ever-decreasing number of those great artists who established the new art of the twentieth century. His sister, Berta Patocková, was resident in Prague until she died in 1960, and Oskar Kokoschka visited her there. She was married to a former General of the Czechoslovak Army. Kokoschka's brother, who settled down in Liebhartstal near , bears a Czech name: Bohuslav. The origin of Kokoschka's name is Slavonic, and President T. G. Masa- ryk enjoyed discussing with the artist its etymological roots.

The Czech lands made a most remarkable contribution to contemporary culture. Renowned poets and authors - , Franz Wer- fel, , , and - come from this part of the world, as does the progenitor of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, one of the true revolutionaries of our modern age, who, together with Karl Marx and Albert Einstein, changed the fundations of our con- sciousness. Georg Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, was a Mora- vian, and so was Edmund Husserl, the philosopher and initiator of phenomenology, and also , a friend and supporter of Ko- koschka, a great avant-garde architect, and one of the early theoreti- cians of . (Ins Leere gesprochen, Trotzdem). The * For Olda. Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk 1417 Viennese art historian, Max Dvorak, who conceived the as the history of the human spirit (Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte) was of Bohemian origin, as was also the composer, .

Kokoschka said to me: "My father still spoke Czech, which we could no longer do." His father, who was a jeweller and goldsmith, had made for his journeyman's piece, the chalice for the Chapel of St. Wenceslas in the Cathedral of St. Vitus in Prague. His mother was a beauty who might have stepped straight out of a picture by Manes. "Their workshop in Prague was highly thought of, and the Emperor Franz I is said to have visited it often, in ordinary civilian clothes, to buy a new snuff-box or to see about the setting of a stone, but more often because my grandmother was such a beautiful woman. On such occasions, he would be invited to stay and drink a cup of coffee. I was told that my father, as a young apprentice, was once lent the Emperor's top hat and malacca cane, and that the Emperor freed him from his in- voluntary imprisonment within the top hat where his head had entirely disappeared!" Kokoschka's father lived in a time when the arts and crafts suffered their first shock from the spread of industrialization. He lost his fortune and, finally, his job. "My father was an embittered man", Kokoschka told me. "He hated the whole world - a Dostoievsky char- acter. He was negative, proud, arrogant, impatient of all compromise. He was at war with the world." "We had many relatives in Vienna. One of the nephews by the name of Schebek shot himself on account of a love affair he had with a woman of the aristocracy. Another ran the Kokoschka School for the study of the piano in the Mariahilf district. He was the leading teacher at the Theresianum. Yet another was the Hofrat Glossy, director of the city library. As a boy he had known Grillparzer, and he was an author- ity in the field of Viennese cultural history. My father wanted no con- tact with any of them. The reason was that he was on the defensive be- cause his business was going downhill. He felt it an injustice that he could do nothing about it. He felt himself an artist, and so he became solitary. "He was a remarkably handsome man. His hair retained its original brown till late in life, and he wore a long, luxuriant beard. I once made a of him, but it was not a good one. I felt that he would soon die and something within me held me back. At the age of seventy he was still very strong, so strong that he could lift a chair from the ground 1418 Josef P. Hodin with two fingers. He could speak several languages and he had read a great deal. One of the first books he gave me, and that was before I could read, was the Orbis Pictus of Jan Amos Comenius. Schiller's 'freedom plays' and works of Herder and Lessing were among the books read aloud to us of an evening. Once he brought me a magic lantern with puzzle pictures, then books on films, and, often, , for he knew how much pleasure these gave me. Later he took great interest in my collection of books, and he took charge of my art treas- ures in his own room."

In Kokoschka's picture of the harbour of Stockholm can be seen the beginning of that early series of town views, the most important of which were painted in the years from 1924 to 1930. The pictures of the city of Prague were painted between 1934 and 1937 and belong to the middle period. They occupy a special place in the sum total of his work. Kokoschka painted this home town of his paternal ancestors more often than any other. His pictures of Prague are less forthright in colour than those he painted in . We find in them, rather, that depth of space which characterises his views of London, combined with the luminosity of those painted in the South, in Italy, Spain, and Africa, so that they seem to present, as it were, a synthesis of North and South, of cold and warm; and this is something that corresponds to thfe character of this fabulous city, which Wilhelm von Humboldt ranked among the seven most beautiful cities of the world. In this connection, also, it is worth noting that Kokoschka himself in some of these pic- tures arrived at a synthesis of his earlier, more graphically detailed style and the strong colour of his later mature work, in which he achieved such tremendous power of expression. This is particularly evident in "Prague from the Villa Kramar", in "Prague, seen from the Schonborngarden", further in "Prague, View of the Banks of the Vltava I and II", and "Prague, View from the Vltava Pier, I-IV". A final picture of the great city, "Prague-Nostalgia", was painted from memory in 1938 in London. Kokoschka has always loved both Prague and Vienna. In his fore- word to an essay by Professor , Kokoschka wrote in 1943: "Vienna looks with hope towards her sister city, Prague. It is not only their past, but also their future, that connects the spiritual history of related peoples. Prague has been called the most westerly of oriental cities. In her beauty, her spiritual power, her historic character, she stands by Vienna not as a rival but as a companion in a like destiny. Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk 1419

They are as two lovely sisters, each with her own grace and charm. And above all they are witnesses to a common culture which in the West is a centre of spiritual exchange, showing the East what the West has to offer and what the West signifies for the East." In a letter to me, Dr. Hugo Feigl, the Prague art dealer, later owner of the Feigl Gallery in New York, wrote: "During his stay in Prague, Kokoschka painted six big views and a small one for me, which is the greatest number of pictures he ever painted of any one city in his career as an artist. When Kokoschka had found a suitable point from which to paint his landscape, my honored task was (diplomatically) to ar- range that he be allowed to occupy it undisturbed for some time. And it was no easy task, if you consider all the odd places where Kokoschka chose to set up his easel. On one occasion, it was in the private house of a bank director's widow; on another, it was on the balcony of the water- works office on the banks of the Vltava, peopled by its unsuspecting busy officials, and again, it was at the window in the retreat of the mem- bers of the Order of the Cross. Dr. Vlasak, Grand Master of the Order, whom I knew well, had, as a matter of fact, emptied the room indicated by Kokoschka, and had put it at his disposal for three weeks. Yet an- other spot chosen by Kokoschka was on the Vysehrad Rock, where we had to clamber around for a whole forenoon like mountaineers, and finally, there were the closed gardens of the American Embassy and the wonderfully dominating position occupied by the villa of the retired and ailing politician, Dr. Kramaf, situated on the old fortifications of the Prague Belvedere. What gave us so much pleasure on these expedi- tions was their invariable success. We never met with a refusal, and at every one of his chosen sites, Kokoschka succeeded in his desired view. The only failure was with the view of the Vysehrad Rocks, for Kokoschka had to leave Prague before he could even start this picture. Of all Kokoschka's of Prague, the palm, in my opinion, should be given to that painted from the villa of Dr. Kramaf, the view of the Mala Strana, the Lesser Side of Prague, with the dome of St. Vitus, now in the possession of Dr. Miiller, the Prague architect. It was sold for the highest price at that time, amounting, I believe, to Kc 68,000." Altogether Kokoschka painted fifteen or maybe sixteen views of Prague. One which I knew in its unfinished state in Prague was the view from the flat of my old teacher of French at the Kleinseitner Real- schule, Dr. Karl Klein, near the Campa Island. When he was in Prague, Kokoschka stayed at first in the Hotel Ambassador, later at the Hotel 1420 Josef P. Hodin Julis on Wenceslas Square. Friends gave him the use of a studio in the upper storey of a house on the quay near the old-town mill. From this vantage point he could see over the Hradcany and the Charles Bridge, the two magnificent landmarks of the town, as well as the old buildings of the Lesser Side, together with the Strahov Monastery, the Vltava beneath, and the domes of the Carmelite monastery with those of the Clementinum as companions on the right bank of the river. All his five views over the Vltava were painted there. Often, he could be seen en- joying his meal in the Café Slávia opposite the National Theatre. In Prague, as elsewhere, a band of admirers gathered round him. Through the good offices of some of these friends, Kokoschka went to Moravská Ostrava, where he painted two landscapes of the town in 1937. Kokoschka worked in Prague on other pictures, too - figure com- positions, two of which were shown in the Mânes Jubilee Exhibition - "Garden I" and "Garden II". Besides that, he finished in those days the portrait of Annie Knize which he had begun in the twenties and on which he had worked a great deal in 1932. In 1934, on the same canvas, he changed the whole composition. Then there is the "Self-portrait with Hat", painted shortly before he left Vienna for Prague, and which was taken over almost unchanged in the larger composition, "Self- portrait with Stick" (1935). Then followed the portrait of Martha Hirsch with ball, and that of Dr. K. P. Palkovsky. A particularly fresh and successful portrait was that of the Viennese industrialist, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, in hunting attire. "The Nymph", and also the seated nude study with unclothed figures in the background are both essentially related to the mysterious composition, "Die Quelle" (The Source) or "Die Quellennymphe", which originated back in 1922/23 with Jacob, Rachel and Leah. In Moravská Ostrava, Kokoschka came very near death. It was there which, as earlier in the "Bach Cantata", he put all that he knew about that he painted a self-portrait, "Portrait of a Degenerate Painter," into which, as earlier in the "Bach Cantate", he put all that he knew about the world and himself. This picture is an artist's will and testament to his time, a backward and forward look at the parting of the ways be- tween reason, in which he believed, and the madness into which he saw the world sinking. In 1935, in Prague, Kokoschka met his future wife, Olda, née Pal- kovská, who, from that moment on, was to stand faithfully at his side and who in 1938 fled with him to England when the Third Reich caught in its claws the little democratic land in which he lived. After the Oskar Kokoschka in his Studio in Villeneuve, Switzerland, 1959 Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of the Artist's Father, Lithograph, 1918

Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of T. G. Masaryk, Crayon, 1935 Oskar Kokoschka, Prague seen from the Villa Kramdr, oil, 1934/35

Oskar Kokoschka, T. G. Masaryk, oil, 1935/36 Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of a Degenerate Artist, oil, 1937 Oskar Kokoschka, The Red Egg (The Bartering away of ), oil, 1940/41

Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk 1421 Munich Agreement of September 29 and 30, 1938, Kokoschka no longer felt himself safe in Prague. With hardly any luggage at all he fled to England. Kokoschka's name stood high on the black list of the Nazis. Three days after their invasion of Austria, the Nazi police were already at his house door to arrest him; and they would have made short work of him after having "honoured" him in the Exhibition of "", and held up his work to public scorn. I well remember Olda Palkovska, a young doctor of law, who had graduated from the University of Prague, during the dark years of the war. Watching her care for the well-being of her husband, the constant help she gave him with his correspondence, in translating and ordering his political writings, protecting him from people he did not want to meet, keeping him young with her own youth, I thought involuntarily of Hendrickje, who saved the life of Rembrandt and secured to him years of tranquil creative work in the midst of ill fortune and decay. Many a time, Kokoschka said to me: "But for her I should not be here today. I should have taken my own life."

President Dr. Edvard Benes wished to bestow some special honour upon Kokoschka, and this honour took the form, as it had done previously in the case of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, of conferring upon him Czechoslovakian nationality. Thus, for the first time, Kokoschka be- came a citizen of the country from which he derived on his father's side. And it was indeed an honour, for this was the country that had given the world a Comenius, a Chelcicky, and a Masaryk. Here, Ko- koschka was on the soil where races met and mingled; in the city where different peoples and cultures found contact with each other and were enriched thereby. But it was a city, too, wherein the tired wanderer through her narrow alleyways became suddenly conscious of her cen- turies-old history and felt its weight to be an almost intolerable burden. At night, the street lights brought thoughts of enlightenment into conflict with Dostoievsky's feverish visions, and bloody wars of religion cast their ancient shadows over the place. Here Slav melancholy and Jewish Talmudism, Hussite Puritanism and Catholic Baroque, have met and etched their runes upon human faces. The Baroque was for Kokoschka not only a style, the style which adorned the buildings of his childhood, but also a manifestation of humanistic significance. He once wrote: 1

1 "An Approach to the Baroque Art of Czechoslovakia", The Burlington Mag- azine (London, November 1942). 1422 Josef P. Hodin

"The Baroque Art of Czechoslovakia shows the world that the study of national factors is insufficient as a basis for the interpretation of artistic achievements; creative works are given their impress not by ideological but by purely realistic forces. Determinants like environ- ment, economic situation, political climate and, last but not least, mental tension which at certain historical moments arise out of the nature of man and the social process he is undergoing, have very often proved to be far more decisive in the history of European civilisation. A case of this nature, not for a long time noticed by historians, partly out of ig- norance, partly out of mistaken prejudices, is the artistic phenomenon which we call Bohemian Baroque. It was only discovered as a distinct phase in the history of art thanks to the researches of the exceptionally gifted young Viennese art-historian Dr. Oskar Pollak, a pupil of Max Dvorak, killed in the first World War, and it retains its values far be- yond local cultural boundaries. A precedent of this nature is offered by the meteoric appearance of the art of the Greek painter Domenico Theo- tocopouli, who, under the name of El Greco, freed the chilled painting of Spain of its canonical fetters. The inhuman Spanish religion of the time of the Inquisition inevitably resuscitated a human outlook shaping the Weltanschauung which conditioned the emergence of Baroque Art everywhere. Such is the law of spiritual tension. The whole history of the Baroque Art of Czechoslovakia shows that the Church has an op- portunity for making peace when, during a period of social decay, the dignity of the human soul is forgotten. The intellectual and moral state of the Church is an infallible pointer to the good and evil tendencies of the religious mind. With a prophetic instinct Baroque Art tried to forestall the social catastrophe inevitable if the Church herself should come under the sway of that Nationalism which sucks dry even now the best of men's minds. ". . . Baroque Art, a product of co-operation to which builder, sculp- tor, painter and musician contributed in equal measure, is so decidedly a universal human expression that its aesthetic formal elements were able to stretch out over the whole world and in no time to affect the local cultures everywhere so profoundly, that it is only with the Baroque Age that something came into being which can be called international art. The same effect was suddenly evident in the country of the Incas and in India and China, on the African coast, in Europe in the South, West and East, just as well as in the North. Even Puritan England had to suffer Christopher Wren's Baroque churches. From the point of view of a seventeenth-century national art-historian - if such Momuses Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk 1423 had by then existed - Baroque Art ought to have been called "degen- erate art" par excellence. But it was only towards the end of the nine- teenth century that authorities on National Art denied, perhaps even against their better aesthetic judgment, the existence of this modern international in their respective spheres of canonized national art districts. Baroque Art is belittled or openly opposed by the aesthetic theories of rampant nationalism, the last word of the hum- drum middle-class of today. Not so in the eyes of the progressive lover of art who does not live in the mental ghetto of nationalism, and who has, above all, retained his ability to rouse himself to a higher concep- tion of the social meaning of creative work, because for him a work of art is not an academic ideal independent of time and space. For him, art expresses problems of mind which cannot be subjugated to so-called eternally valid laws and appreciations. The lover of Baroque Art recog- nizes today that during that period men desired nothing more or less than the realisation of the prophesied paradise. "... In the Baroque Church the German composed the melodies, the Czech built the organ; Italian workers in stucco, Austrian painters, Spanish-Jewish embroiderers and goldsmiths, architects from Saxony, French weavers - all competed with our Tyrolean carvers of crucifixes, all doing their best to make the house of God a house of man. Could the revival of the idea of motherhood, the ascendancy of the Regina Coeli, serve as an explanation for the new circuit of energy in religion? It is certainly a fact that the power of the God of Wrath of old, had been withering away. Whatever their former persuasion, the fellow artists united to create the Baroque Church even if formally they had to be- come converts, as had Mathias Braun."

It was in Prague that Kokoschka met the man of whom he once said: "The individual person, subject to the flight of time and the changing scene, to his personal destiny and the approach of age, seems in this man to have been overcome. I believe that biological law makes excep- tions in the case of genius." He was speaking of T.G. Masaryk. Dr. Feigl wrote to me: "Kokoschka's most memorable experience during his stay in Prague was this meeting with the venerable President T. G. Masaryk and the painting of Masaryk's portrait, which I sold to a New York collector.2 It was due to my contacting the head of the Presidential Chancellery, and to a meeting with Masaryk's favourite grandchild,

2 The painting, "Thomas G. Masaryk", 1935-36, is now in the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. 1424 Josef P. Hodin the amiable art historian, Dr. Anna Masaryk, at a supper arranged by my wife in our home for that purpose, that the way was paved for a meeting between the President and the artist.3 Masaryk's personality fascinated Kokoschka. On one occasion, when he had just come back to his hotel from one of the many sittings on the portrait, he confessed to me that he had been so overcome by his admiration for the wise old man that he had kissed his hand. A rare relationship of deep veneration on the one side and of sincere sympathy on the other seemed to have grown up between them. How otherwise could one interpret the many occasions, weeks after the portrait was finished, on which President Masaryk sent his own car to pick up Kokoschka at his hotel and to bring him to his summer seat, Lany, for a talk over coffee?" The main link between the artist and the statesman was Kokoschka's great admiration for J. A. Comenius, the originator of elementary edu- cation, who saw in the education of mankind to moral responsibility, freedom of thought and action, the one salvation for the future. Since his youth he had been one of those who tirelessly applied the teachings of the Czech apostle of peace and world brotherhood to the evils of the times, pointing out that the way of dual morality could only lead the world to corruption and ruin. "When hate rules instead of love, oppres- sion instead of reason, exploitation instead of freedom, when nationalism reigns instead of humanism, and might instead of right, there is no de- liverance. The only deliverance is through the unity of mankind through love and understanding; deliverance is possible through a non-material- istic spirit in which the freedom and dignity of the individual, respect for life and justice, have their place. . . ."

It was the idea of the International Elementary School, an international school pact which should remove the poison of nationalist hatred from the education of nations, which caused Kokoschka to approach the man who had drawn attention so emphatically in his writings to the Come- nius tradition. But we should be giving a wrong impression if we failed to add that it was not only the humanist, but the artist, the portraitist, who was anxious to preserve the likeness of T. G. Masaryk, the philos- opher and statesman, for posterity. In the gallery of Kokoschka's por- traits, that of T.G. Masaryk is of particular significance. It is not only the likeness of a great man, but it also represents his attitude to tradition and the work which he accomplished. To the left of the seated figure of the statesman, we see as a distant vision the burning of John Hus at 3 Dr. Zenkl, then Mayor of Prague, also contributed to this success. Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk 1425 the stake, which began the revolt of the Czech people to the reactionary forces of Europe, and, dominating the whole, the spiritualised face of Comenius, his body covered by his work, the Orbis Pictus.* A gesture of the wonderfully painted hands exhorts the world that man should follow his five senses and thereby form a natural judgment so as to find the way back to a life of reason and not let himself be confused by abstruse logic. That was why Kokoschka sketched eye, nose, mouth, hand, and ear on the cover of the book. T. G. Masaryk, in the centre, is listening with one side of his being to those voices of the past, while the other is turned towards the future, a view of Prague with the Castle and the Charles Bridge and children playing happily on the bank of the Vltava. Freedom . . . humanism . . . which have grown out of the mar- tyrdom and the spiritual history of the nation - that is what is in the portrait which Oskar Kokoschka painted of T. G. Masaryk.

When Oskar Kokoschka speaks of Masaryk, a tender note comes into his voice. The painter met Masaryk for the first time at the President's country seat at Lany, in the presence of Dr. Alice Masaryk. "Later, I was left alone with him", said Kokoschka, "and so I met him often. Then came his illness - his two strokes - and I had to wait before I could see him again. From the beginning I approached him quite naturally and broke the ice of convention at once. I sought and used the human contact with Masaryk. He laughed at the things I said. He grew accustomed to me and I can even say that in a certain sense he needed me. You know the way people usually approach great men - but at our second meeting he put his arms round me and kissed me. I spent many hours with Masaryk, and his question: 'When are you coming again?' still sounds in my ears. "Originally it was planned that I was to live at Lany while I was working on the portrait. An apartment was placed at my disposal, but I was too restless to stay in it. It was too quiet for me, too much like a monastery; there was no inn in the neighborhood. I had to go back to town. Then there were other things to think of. I can never travel alone by train, how was I to get to Lany? But the President understood and sent his own car to fetch me. It pleased me very much to see the castle guards stand to attention at the approach of the President's car with the number 1."

4 Later, the Orbis Pictus was replaced by the Via Lucis, the book on the way to achieve eternal peace between man, and the inscription was added: J. Amos Komensky VIA LUCIS. 1426 Josef P. Hodin

When Kokoschka was about to begin his portrait, the President posed elegantly against the arm of a chair. But Kokoschka did not want an official portrait. He talked about this and that and tried to make Masa- ryk forget he was having his portrait painted. At last, the President leaned back quite naturally in the comfortable chair. "I'll paint you like that!" declared Kokoschka. "How many sittings will you need? Two - three?" "I don't know." Kokoschka could not say. He visited the President for two years. "What impressed me about Masaryk", he said, "was not that he lived at Lany or the Castle and not that he was President. My aesthetic sense appreciated the elegance of this man in his advanced age. He was dressed very well. There was harmony between his person and his surroundings - a thing which one seldom sees. I have seen it in Vienna before the first World War among the old aristocracy. The long, rather lean figure of the President had an extraordinarily beautiful effect. I love painting old men, especially if they are wise — with Masaryk it was something special. A great perfection - that is perhaps the best expression - emanated from his appearance."

In his talks with Masaryk, Kokoschka did not restrict himself to humanistic and political problems; he amused the President with his light Viennese manner and thus seized the opportunity of studying his expressions. Other artists have other ways. Edvard Munch, for instance, talked a great deal, but he did not let his model say anything; when he was asked why he talked so much, he said: "To build a wall of words around me behind which I can hide myself and be alone with my thoughts." Kokoschka felt that he had a restful influence on Masaryk, who knew how devoted the painter was to him. Kokoschka was in- terested in Masaryk's ideas on Comenius and their application to the present day. Kokoschka loved to tell how the President authorised his office to hand over to him a document in which it was stated that the carrying out of the International School reform would be the crowning point of the President's ideas. Kokoschka encouraged the President to broadcast a speech to the world to this effect before it was too late. The President agreed, but was prevented by illness. "We talked about Chelcicky", said Kokoschka, "but here I felt that our views diverged". The President held the view that a war of defence was morally permissible and referred to his arguments with Tolstoy. Kokoschka agreed with Chelcicky's consistent pacifism, the necessity of Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk 1427 the non-violence policy which Gandhi represented. The fundamental question was whether the world can be changed if man is not changed from within. Chelcicky condemned the folly of war in the spirit in which he interpreted the Vulgate text of St. Luke, xxi, 25-27. There, human imperfections are compared with a restless sea: "By the restless sea is meant sometimes many evil men, and sometimes one particular wicked man even as the Lord God saith - unkind as the restless sea which can- not be put to rest. From the sound of the cruel sea and the billows thereof this Bohemian land hath suffered much since well-nigh all the countries round about rose up against it by reason of dissension in faith, so that the crashing of these billows could be heard almost through- out the world. "Furthermore the raging of this sea may be, and oftimes is over earthly things: For them the one party doth constantly wage war against the other party, being fain to magnify themselves above others and to be of more account than others, and for this cause they wrangle and seize others' possessions - men and honour, and for this cause they buffet one another, burn one another, shed blood. So likewise other sinful folk like the sea, restless and unquelled in evil, being stirred by devils to unrest that ever evil may go against evil, as sea waves against other sea waves, quarrel against quarrel, pride against pride, hardship against hardship — in one place they have killed one another, elsewhere robbed one another, elsewhere challenged one another as being fain to slay or despoil one another. And in this wise is the mournful sound of that sea ever to be heard. "And amid all the tempests of that sea is temptation uttered to the servants of Christ. Even as spake the Lord saying: - 'When ye shall hear of wars and quarrellings, fear ye not inasmuch as this sea shall not overwhelm you with its billows neither shall an hair of your head perish: if ye abide in Me, My peace shall abide in you, and the tempest shall pass you by'. Now all these things, the which Christ here sayeth, constrain us to hold ourselves in readiness to the end that we await His Advent in worthy fashion." 5 The question whether the views of the Hussites or Chelcicky's criti- cism of them should be considered right was decided by Masaryk in favour of the Hussites. "But I could not talk to him for long about such things", said Kokoschka. "As soon as I noticed that the subject was tiring him I stopped. Masaryk was very old when I painted him. After his stroke he carried one arm in a sling. He saw badly and had to 5 Translated from the Old Czech by Dr. K. Fitzgibbon Young. 1428 Josef P. Hodin go close to whatever he was looking at. His eyes were very blue, trans- parent, almost blind. When he was getting better I sent him a telegram. The Post Office had just issued new telegram forms and I sent him one with flowers on it. I was told that he had it described to him and was pleased about it. When anything was being discussed Masaryk used to mutter: 'Kokoschka would say . . .'." A personal relationship had grown up between the two men, the artist and the philosopher, and shortly be- fore his death Masaryk asked for Kokoschka. On one occasion, Masaryk was just coming back from a drive. He was sitting, wrapped in rugs, in the carriage drawn by two beautiful horses. "I have come too early", called Kokoschka apologetically. Masaryk was in an excellent humour and looked at him roguishly. "You look like a little boy who has been stealing apples", said Kokoschka. Masaryk laughed heartily. Not many people spoke to him so freely. Masaryk liked the artist's intimate manner. "Don't you ever have black coffee after dinner?" Kokoschka asked him once. "No, I only drink Haag." "I must have some, I can't work without coffee." Encouraged by Kokoschka, the President ordered black coffee for himself as well, against all rules. It did him no harm at all.

Kokoschka first made two sketches of the President and then began to paint his big picture on a small, light easel. Masaryk's figure is thin, transparent - that is how Kokoschka saw him, standing almost on the other side of life. The figure of Comenius was also sketched at Lany. Kokoschka said: "I have painted a Masaryk who still believed in prog- ress. The greatness but also the tragic and touching thing in his person- ality was that he sought to carry out the high ideals of pure democracy and humanity in political reality. People made him feel it. When I knew him he was no longer the great man - the Masaryk I met was the lovable old man whose lifework was finished. And I loved him very much."